Species Thinking: Animals, Women, and Literary Tropes in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

This essay examines how Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman charts women's vexed relationships to the conceptual categories of the human and the animal in eighteenth-century writing. It argues that Wollstonecraft's tactical use of animal metaphors should be understood in the context of "species thinking," a mode of thinking that starkly differentiates humans from other animals in order to champion the soul, reason, and language as quintessentially human faculties. The analysis foregrounds how-as Wollstonecraft draws from the modern species concept in order to make a progressive argument about gender equality-she relegates animals to an inferior moral status.